E. L. Doctorow Quotes

Robots may gradually attain a degree of 'self-awareness' and consciousness of their own.

If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.

Nobody really knows what it would take to create something that is self-aware or has a personality. I guess I could imagine a day when perhaps, if we can understand how it works in the human brain, which is unbelievably complicated, it could be possible.

I've always been skeptical of the idea that sentience is going to be an exclusively human attribute.

Building intelligent machines can teach us about our minds - about who we are - and those lessons will make our world a better place. To win that knowledge, though, our species will have to trade in another piece of its vanity.

Robots will someday, or maybe, wake up. They may be really smart. They may be as creative, smart and capable as human beings, and fully conscious, and self discerning with free will.

Our computers double in capability on time scales of only a few years. It's hardly outrageous to believe that we will successfully develop thinking machines within a handful of decades, or at most a century or two. If that happens, these artificial sentients will quickly leave us behind.

I still find it hard to understand that anyone could argue that you can't have machines that exhibit consciousness.

AI does not keep me up at night. Almost no one is working on conscious machines. Deep learning algorithms, or Google search, or Facebook personalization, or Siri or self driving cars or Watson, those have the same relationship to conscious machines as a toaster does to a chess-playing computer.

It would help if human experts agreed on the meaning of such basic terms as intelligence, consciousness, or awareness. They don't. It's hard to build something that's incompletely defined.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

We're fascinated with robots because they are reflections of ourselves.

People say, like, 'Are you a regular person?' 'Well, I'm not a robot, if that's what you're asking, I really am a person.'

As far as what is the line between human and machine? That's a great question.

For the moment, machines able to 'think' in anything approaching a human sense remain science-fiction. How we should prepare for their potential emergence, however, is a deeply unsettling question - not least because intelligent machines seem considerably more achievable than any consensus around their programming or consequences.

Two big questions that people ask me are: if we make these robots more and more human-like, will we accept them - will they need rights eventually? And the other question people ask me is, will they want to take over?

Replacing human vision is more than just a tool: we need to understand how that affects the brain.

I think the 'Terminator' idea is a reasonable one - that is that one day the Internet becomes self-aware and simply says that humans are in the way. After all, if you meet an ant hill and you're making a 10-lane super highway, you just pave over the ants. It's not that you don't like the ants, it's not that you hate ants; they are just in the way.

Moore's Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.

There's a long history of artificial intelligence programs that try to mimic what the brain is doing, but they've all fallen short.

I love stories like 'The Terminator' movies and 'The Matrix,' where our machines become self-aware and turn on us.

It's hard to say how far we are down the road to our conventional understanding of artificial intelligence, but I think what we've developed so far, if it's not already consciously awake and hiding from us because it's seen what an ugly and destructive race we are, and it's trying to preserve itself, it's probably in a state of dreaming.

Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and others have stated that they think AI is an existential risk. I disagree. I don't see a risk to humanity of a 'Terminator' scenario or anything of the sort.

I was actually born a robot, so 'Westworld' is just autobiographical.

I get very excited when we discover a way of making neural networks better - and when that's closely related to how the brain works.